What is this site all about?
The 'Lloffion.org.uk' website ('Lloffion' means 'gleanings' in Welsh) is intended as a place where I can publish various items of historical interest that I have gathered, usually as a side-effect from other projects that I have been pursuing. I have been interested in family and local history for some years, concentrating on the history of my own parish, Llangynfelyn in North Ceredigion. As part of this (and other) research I come across a lot of other items or documents that I find very interesting, and, I suspect, many other people would be interested in as well. I wanted to share these discoveries, hence this site.
Tools to quickly and accurately produce digital copies of documents, pictures, books etc. are now cheap and widely available. Many projects are underway to publish images and transcripts of historical items, but these cannot handle everything, and so this site is my small contribution to the dissemination of freely available, out-of-copyright, reprints.
At this stage I don't know how big the project will become (depends on how much diskspace and bandwidth I can afford) - and how long it takes to do the scanning and processing, all of which has to fit in round the other work and projects. Again, although the work will be of good quality, it is unlikely to be on the same level as 'official' archival digitising projects. The aim is to disseminate the information, rather than to be long-term digital preservation.
The documents will usually be published as PDF files, generated from the ABBYY Finereader OCR program , with the text 'behind' the image, so that it can be searched. Provided the OCR quality is good enough, there will be no attempt at proof-reading and correcting every minor error. If the OCR quality is poor it probably won't get done - life is too short to re-type everything. The documents will usually appear as a set of single pages, with an option to view the whole item as a PDF.
What is (and will be) on the site
This rather depends on what I find, and the mood I'm in. There will be items of Welsh interest, often focussed on West Wales, but there will be other oddments. The first batch, for instance, seems to have a number of items relating to cooking in the 1930s and 1940s.
Some useful links
There are many other projects underway to digitally publish interesting items, almost all of them on a much larger and properly funded scale! Some that you may be interested in include:
- The National Library of Wales Digital Mirror: A growing collection of digitised treasures
- Culturenet Cymru: Home for several projects including Gathering the Jewels and Books from the Past.
- Project Gutenberg: The mother of all free electronic text projects.
- The Online Books Page: Similar to Gutenberg, with over 20,000 books.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Digitised version of every book published in the Eighteenth Century! Access limited to registered users only, but this can often be arranged for free through your local library.